Never Been That
by northernexposure
Summary: Very short, very angsty one-shot from Nikki's POV following the events of Bloodlines 1&2. Warning - SPOILERS.


Never Been That

**A/N:** Very short, very angsty one-shot from Nikki's POV. Never written for these characters before, but always loved them.

**Warning **– spoilers for S14's _Bloodlines 1&2_

Reviews loved and appreciated!

-X-

The simple idea of his death had not occurred to her before. The rank inconceivability of it: that his life could be torn away, caught like flotsam in a violent tide. Not Harry, surely. That was for others. She, Harry, Leo – they stood on the other side of that bottomless, awful ocean. On dry ground, always, just dipping their toes in the water. Well, not Leo, perhaps. There but for the grace of God. And she believed in God. She _believed_…

The magnitude of loss that had threatened to engulf her at Leo's news had been enormous. Absolute, really. Too much, in fact, for her to take in, lest that void in turn swallow her whole. So she hadn't. She had immersed herself in the unreality of Harry's absence, in the day – next Monday – that had not yet passed without his return. She had looked at his desk, at his chair, at the blue jacket that still hung behind both, temporarily abandoned like all these things mentioned - as they were every night, but only until morning. Like her. If she could kill time until Monday… then, perhaps…

The words that had echoed in her head immediately – and there were only three – reverberated (oddly) in her voice, not his, though she was the one that had never said them. Nikki hadn't ever thought she needed to. Not really. She had thought it was implicit, in her smile, in the way she greeted him after absence, in her willingness to work his cases so that he could be with Anna, somewhere else. But suddenly, she had wondered. When the possibility of him ever hearing them in her voice had been removed, they had suddenly seemed so much more important. Vital, even. And, after all, as impossible as…

She had shrugged them away, those words. It had been too late, and her reasons were unclear. And then Nikki had been confronted with another possibility, one that she had never before entertained. A Harry who would no longer vacillate between women, no longer dance from one to another in a long line of encounters no deeper than the tears shed by any one of them. Harry as father, as husband, even. There had been an image of him, suddenly, in her mind, a brief flash of intuition. Harry, chasing after a child – a boy – the two of them rushing through sunlight on a clear day.

_On a clear day, you can see forever._

Except that it wasn't a clear day, and it never would be again. The world without Harry Cunningham in it was a world cast in infinite, indefinite grey.

Nikki had remembered, then, the feel of him lifting her, of being weightless in his arms. She had experienced it through a haze, a mist of sleep too heavy to be natural, though her mind had been too fugged to realise it at the time. And then later, through her terror and panic and nakedness, he had been there again, his hands on her bare skin, his voice reassuring, and she hadn't wanted to let him go…

_But we were never like that. It was never like that, not between us…_

It may not have been the only time she'd wondered why it never had been, but it was the first time she'd consciously acknowledged the question. It flitted through the fog of her grief like a beacon, dodging close and then skittering away. But there wasn't any point, because he was gone. It was over, and the world would keep turning without him in it, however heinous that seemed. And she missed him. Oh, she _missed_ him.

Except that he wasn't gone. Not really. That image of him, standing in the shadows behind Leo, had been so shocking that she'd been forced to turn away. And he'd caught her as she'd stumbled, as he always did, as he always had, metaphorically _and _literally – whatever she needed, whenever she needed it. He'd been there, in the flesh, his face against her hair, holding her so tightly she'd almost been robbed of the breath to cry. Almost, but not quite.

Harry, back from the dead, but incomplete. Battered, and bruised, and lacking, robbed in more ways than he even realised at that moment. And the break in his eyes when he did, the hurt, the anger… What could ever surmount that? At what point would his world be whole again, untarnished?

He'd walked away from them in a haze of righteous anger, and Nikki had almost said it, then. She'd run after him, and pulled him close, unable to bear the idea that this glimpse of him, so brief, was not the end, but merely an interlude. That he would go again, and perhaps not come back – that this time he may not cheat death. And those words had surfaced in the black oil of her still-shocked mind. But it hadn't been right. He'd already been pulling away, and besides, it would have meant something more than she intended. Or no – not more. Something different. Different to what they were. Because they'd never been that. Whatever else they'd been, they'd never been that.

She'd sat beside him on the plane home, their fingers entwined. Every now and then, his thumb had slid over the back of her hand. But when she'd turned to look at him, his gaze had been elsewhere, and full of shadows. And somehow, though it was not something she had spent time contemplating before, Nikki knew that if there had ever been a right time, it had passed. Just as she realised that perhaps… perhaps, they should have, at some point…

She'd shaken her head, a movement so imperceptible Harry would not have even seen it. And as she'd turned to watch the clouds cut themselves in two over the sharp edges of their wings, she'd let the words out on a silent breath that he would never hear.

Because they'd never been that.

_They never had_.

**[END]**


End file.
